The field of digital rights management has grown significantly over recent years. Generally speaking, content authors and distributors wish to protect their rights in digital content, in order to avoid having the content be duplicated and distributed freely without any benefit to them. To protect digital content, the content author or distributor may encrypt the content or otherwise block it from use (e.g., by not providing a critical portion of the content) and may then require the prospective end-user to engage in a process to unlock the content or to otherwise make the content usable. In many cases, the content author or distributor may collect payment from the end-user in return for providing the end-user with an unlock-code (e.g., decryption key) or for otherwise making the content usable by the end-user (e.g., by providing the missing critical portion of the content).
One area where management of digital rights has become particularly important is cellular wireless communications. Traditionally, cellular carriers focused primarily on distributing mobile communication devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants to their subscribers and providing their subscribers with cellular communication service. With continued advances in technology for playing out and managing media on mobile devices, however, most cellular carriers have begun to additionally focus on distributing premium digital content to their subscribers. In particular, most cellular carriers now provide their subscribers with a convenient mechanism for purchasing, downloading, and/or playing out (or otherwise executing or rendering) on their devices a variety of premium digital content, such as music, video, ringtones, screensavers, user-interface themes, games, and the like.
By way of example, a cellular carrier may operate (or contract with a vendor to operate) an online content store, through which the carrier's subscribers can browse, purchase, and download premium content for playout on their devices. In typical practice, the carrier may provision its subscriber's mobile devices with a link to such a store, so that the subscribers can conveniently browse to the store and purchase and download content to their devices. As a further convenience, the carrier may charge any such purchases to the subscriber's monthly service account, in order to expedite the purchase process, and to thereby improve user-experience and increase revenue to the carrier.
As another example, a carrier may pre-load samples of premium content onto their subscribers devices and may require subscribers to pay (or agree to pay) the carrier in order to fully activate the content if they desire. For instance, a carrier may pre-load a subscriber device with a limited-function version of game and may program the device (e.g., the game) with a feature through which the subscriber can purchase a full-use right. Upon invocation of that feature, the device may communicate with a network server in order to download an unlock-key or other logic and to charge an activation/unlock fee to the subscriber's service account.
As still another example, a carrier may provide advertisements to its subscribers, soliciting the subscribers to purchase premium content. For instance, the carrier may include such advertisements within mailed monthly statements, or the carrier may transmit electronic content advertisements to its subscribers, by e-mail, SMS messaging, MMS messaging, or the like. Depending on their configuration, electronic content advertisements can conveniently allow the recipient subscriber to purchase and download premium content by simply clicking on a purchase-link or the like, thus once again further increasing carrier revenue.